What We Should Know about Honey

The process that produces honey may have helped form humans too. Scientists believe that wild hives full of honey provided the calories that early humans such as Homo erectus (直立人), walking in Africa , needed to develop their brains into those of modern humans. That puts honey in a class with fire, tool use, and hunting as a key ingredient in the evolution of human beings.

With time, those evolved brains learned to domesticate bees to produce honey in a farmed setting. Today’s beekeepers support large-scale industrial farms, which would be unable to grow their crops without hiring traveling groups of bees to come pollinate (授粉) their vast, single-species fields. The bees will endlessly fill the towers of combs put onto their hives by the beekeeper, who then collects the extra honey for human consumption while still leaving the bees all they need to eat.

Today, the average American consumes nearly a pound and a half of honey every year, in tea, on toast, and beyond. Honey is a timeless treasure. Literally—it never goes bad. Samples nearly 3,000 years old found in the Egyptian pyramids are as eatable as the day they were entombed. Its anti-microbial nature also makes honey an excellent cure for wounds, keeping infection out while holding in the moisture that skin needs to heal.

However, bees’ good health is not guaranteed. U.S. beekeepers lose about 40 percent of their hives annually to colony collapse disorder. The problem lies in the growth of industrial agriculture and pesticide use, as well as changes in weather patterns, all of which reduce the number of flowers bees have to visit. If bees continue to die, apples and peaches (along with any crop that relies on their pollination) will become scarcer and pricier. As will honey.

Get outdoors with us this summer and experience the excitement and peace within our unique programs. Research suggests that being physically active within green spaces helps reduce stress, anxiety and anger, and improves moods and overall health and wellbeing. Our Department combines experiential activities for your enjoyment.

All fitness levels are welcome; we can accommodate most accessible needs. Please contact Laurie Wright at wright@utsc.utoronto.ca with any questions. Trips are offered to registered U of T students first and then if there is space to staff, non-registered students and guests of the participants. Register at recreg.utoronto.ca or in person at the TPASC Registration Desk.

Participants will travel by bus up to the Horseshoe Valley Resort. You may choose between a 3-hour Treetop Trekking adventure or 2 hours of x-country mountain biking through the region’s forest trails. Treetop Trekking involves zip-lining (moving quickly with the rider suspended from a cable) and climbing through obstacle courses in a peaceful forest setting. Both adventures will be instructor-led and all equipment will be provided. No experience necessary. Beginner to advanced courses will be available.

A bus will transport students to Milton to either hike the area or rock climb. The rock climbing will take place at Rattlesnake Point and there is an opportunity for students to challenge themselves by climbing up to 80ft on some of the best rocks in Southern Ontario. All instructors are fully certified and all equipment will be provided. A custom course will be set up to meet the needs of climbers. The hike will take place through some of the Bruce Peninsula trails and Halton Parks. Participants will have over 20kms of trails to choose from. You may hike with a group or follow the map trails with some friends.

The Warsaw Caves Conservation Area and Campground takes its name from a series of seven caves found in the park. Join us as we explore the multiple courses through the caves have a picnic lunch. Come enjoy this natural underground jungle gym.

9 . The last few months had brought to my attention an important incompatibility between us — one that I’d never noticed before. Despite being a pair of lifelong travelers, Felipe and I seldom travel in a similar way. The reality about Felipe is that he’s both the best traveler I’ve ever met and by far the worst. He hates strange bathrooms and dirty restaurants and uncomfortable trains and foreign beds. Given a choice, he will always select a lifestyle of routine, familiarity, and reassuringly boring everyday practices. All of which might make you assume that the man is not fit to be a traveler at all. But you would be wrong to assume that, for here is Felipe’s traveling gift, his superpower, the secret weapon that makes him peerless. He can create a familiar habitat of boring everyday practices for himself anyplace, if you just let him stay in one spot. He can assimilate absolutely anywhere on the planet in about three days, and then he’s capable of staying put in that place for the next decade or so without complaint. This is why Felipe has been able to live all over the world. Not merely travel, but live. Over the year he has folded himself into societies from South America to Europe, from the Middle East to the South Pacific. He arrives somewhere totally new, decides he likes the place, moves right in, learns the language, and instantly becomes a local.

While Felipe can find a corner anywhere in the world and settle down for good, I can’t. I am infinitely curious and almost infinitely patient with minor disasters, which makes me a far better day-to-day traveler than he will ever be. So I can go anywhere on the planet—that’s not a problem. The problem is I just can’t live anywhere on the planet. I’d realized this only a few weeks earlier, back in northern Laos, when Felipe had woken up one lovely morning in Luang Prabang and said, “Darling, let’s stay here.”

“Sure,” I’d said. “We can stay here for a few more days if you want.”

“No, I mean let’s move here. Let’s forget about me immigrating to America. It’s too much trouble. This is a wonderful town. I like the feeling of it. It reminds me of Brazil thirty years ago. It wouldn’t take much money or effort for us to run a little hotel or shop here, rent an apartment, settle in ….” He was serious. He would just do that. But I can’t.

10 . A Neurologist’s Tips to Protect Your Memory

As we age, our memory declines. This is a fixed ___________ for many of us; however, according to neuroscientist Dr. Richard Restak, a neurologist and clinical professor, decline is not ___________.

Ultimately, “we are what we can remember,” he said. Here are some of Dr. Restak’s tips for developing and ___________ a healthy memory.

Some memory lapses are actually attention problems, not memory problems. ___________, if you’ve forgotten the name of someone you met at a cocktail party, it could be because you were talking with several people at the time.

One way to pay attention when you learn new information is to ___________ the word. Having a picture associated with the word, Restak said, can improve ___________.

There are many memory exercises that you can ___________ into everyday life. Dr. Restak suggested composing a grocery list and memorizing it. When you get to the store, don’t ___________ pull out your list (or your phone) — instead, pick up everything according to your memory.

Once in a while, get in the car without turning on your GPS, and try to ___________ through the streets from memory. A small 2020 study suggested that people who used GPS more frequently over time showed a steeper cognitive ____________ in spatial memory three years later.

Dr. Restak’s “favorite working memory game” is 20 Questions — in which a group thinks of a person, place or object, and the other person, the questioner, asks 20 questions with a yes-or-no answer. Because to succeed, he said, the questioner must hold all of the ____________ answers in memory in order to guess the correct answer.

The point is to ____________ your working memory, “maintaining information and moving it around in your mind,” Restak wrote.

One early indicator of memory issues, according to Dr. Restak, is ____________ fiction. “People, when they begin to have memory difficulties, tend to switch to reading nonfiction,” he said. Fiction requires active engagement with the text, starting at the beginning and working through to the end.

Storing everything on your phone means that “you don’t know it,” Dr. Restak said, which can ____________ our own mental abilities. The second way our relationship with technology is harmful to memory is because it often takes our focus away from the task at hand.